Theorising Textbook Adaptation in English Language Teaching

• Even though textbooks are a central component of the daily instructional practice of English language teachers, relatively little research has been conducted on how teachers actually use (i.e., adapt) textbooks in the classroom. This gap is aggravated by the fact that the terminology proposed in the literature to analyse teachers’ textbook use is characterised by inconsistencies because different terms denote the same adaptation techniques, identical terms refer to different techniques and suggested frameworks differ in the fact that comparable techniques are allocated to different categories. This inconsistency mirrors the difficulty of operationally defining adaptation techniques, as the terms used may be unambiguous but vague and therefore of reduced explanatory power or more specific but potentially unreliable because an adaptation may be matched to different terms given the complexity of a particular textbook adaptation. Discussing these aspects, this paper proposes a research-informed framework to contribute to a systematic description of textbook adaptation in foreign and second language teaching. Examining adaptation as a process, it is argued that teachers, driven by an identified or felt mismatch between the textbook and other factors (e.g., school facilities, the learners, teacher cognition, course requirements, or outdatedness of the materials), engage in adaptation based on principles (i.e., ideas about best practices, by making changes to the content, the language and/or the sequence of activities offered by the textbook authors). Even though related to English language teaching, this paper does not exclusively inform this context as it offers implications for research on textbook use in other disciplines.

Ključne besede: prilagoditev, prilagoditvene tehnike, poučevanje tujega jezika, učbenik Textbooks in language teaching: the need for adaptation The significance of textbooks as the main medium in English language teaching (ELT) (Mishan, 2021;Tomlinson & Masuhara, 2018) as well as in other subject areas (Smart et al., 2020) has been widely recognised.As a convenient tool, textbooks allow teachers to plan and administer their lessons by using them as a guideline and resource; they expose learners to samples of the target language and help them preview and review lesson content that is presented in a visually appealing way; moreover, they encourage administrators to base courses on the sequence given in textbooks so that they function as coursebooks (Gray, 2016;McGrath, 2013).Based on these advantages, textbooks appear to be an indispensable (and for publishers highly lucrative) component of institutional language teaching as their utilisation fulfils learners' and teachers' expectations, thus they provide courses with 'face validity' (Mishan, 2021, p. 2;Vitta, 2021), and serve as the actual curriculum in numerous contexts (Garton & Graves, 2014): without a coursebook, 'a program may have no central core and learners may not receive a syllabus that has been systematically planned and developed' (Richards, 2001, p. 1).
For language teaching, an important distinction is made between global, localised, and local textbooks (López-Barrios & Villanueva de Debat, 2014).Global textbooks are produced for learners worldwide by publishers usually located in countries where the target language is spoken, while localised (i.e., modified global textbooks) and local textbooks are designed for learners situated in a specific location where the target language is learned but not the environmental language.They include materials that engage learners in the comparison of the target language and culture with their own language and culture and may address specific incentives to learn the target language.Local textbooks are usually issued by publishers located in the countries where the language is learned.They comply with curricular regulations enacted by state authorities to receive permission to be used in state schools and are comparatively inexpensive for parents and state schools; due to these production conditions, locally produced textbooks usually do not produce innovative methodological approaches or startling content (Kovač & Šebart, 2019).Especially (but not exclusively) global textbooks are likely to cause the need for adaptation, (i.e., modifications applied to the textbook materials) because of the distance between textbook authors and users (Tomlinson & Masuhara, 2018) and the fact that they 'are written for everyone and therefore for no one' (McGrath, 2013, p. 59).Because textbook authors and publishers cannot consider the numerous specific conditions of varying local contexts where the textbooks are used, the textbook materials are potentially incongruent with the teaching and learning environment (Madsen & Bowen, 1978).Mismatches between what the material offers and the conditions of the learning context (e.g., learner expectations or proficiency levels, teacher beliefs about best teaching practices, school culture and infrastructure, institutional regulations as evidenced in curricula, examinations, or expected methods) force teachers to adapt textbooks (Ariyan & Pavlova, 2019;Macalister, 2016a;McDonough et al., 2013).Furthermore, adaptation is considered a sign of professionalism because it lessens the danger that teachers are patronised by textbooks given their potential 'to exercise a tyrannical function as the arbiter of course content and teaching methods' (Cunningsworth, 1995, p. 7), to deskill teachers (Akbari, 2008;Littlejohn, 2012;Pouromid & Amerian, 2018;Rathert & Cabaroğlu, 2021) and to reinforce transmission-based teaching (Smart et al., 2020).
Research has recently started to pay increasing attention to the use and adaptation of textbooks and other learning materials in language teaching.In relation to this, materials as a field of inquiry currently appear under-theorised both in terms of what learning materials actually are and how materials function as both objects used by teachers and learners and subjects shaping classroom interaction (Guerrettaz et al., 2021;Harwood, 2021).Specifically related to textbook use, there is inconsistency in operationalised terms to analyse and describe why and how teachers and learners engage in adaptation (McGrath, 2013, p. 63;Tomlinson & Masuhara, 2018, p. 105).Recognising the wide spectrum of learning materials and the role of teachers, learners and administrators as users and adapters of materials (Guerrettaz et al., 2021;Harwood, 2021), this paper focuses on textbook adaptation carried out by teachers and identifies techniques employed, principles, reasons and purposes driving teachers to engage in textbook adaptation.Additionally, procedures are reported that teachers can follow to arrive at reflective adaptation approaches.In other words, this contribution aims to theorise textbook adaptation by defining key issues surrounding textbook adaptation.Explicating this issue, our contribution aims at encouraging researchers who are interested in examining this field of study and practitioners to raise their awareness of the complexity of adaptation and to help them reflect on the utilisation of this central medium in instructional practice.Based on scholarly monographs and research conducted in ELT, we hope that the considerations and suggestions are informative for other educational domains.

Techniques in textbook adaptation
Teachers can select textbook materials as they are or adapt them to varying extents ranging from slight modifications without deviating from the guidance offered to use the textbook as a resource book when developing procedures not foreseen by textbook authors (Ur, 2015).The potential utilisations of textbooks by teachers are shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1 Components of textbook use
For adaptation purposes, teachers can benefit from the techniques of omission, addition, substitution, and modification to engage in adaptation.These adaptations may be directed toward the language of texts, the content that is conveyed through the language, or the activities and procedures in which the textbook aims to engage learners.Tomlinson and Masuhara (2004) reasonably point to the reduction or increase of textbook materials, and replacement or modification without change of material amount (indicated through plus, minus, and zero) as criteria to classify adaptation techniques.Table 1, extending an overview by McGrath (2013, p. 64), allocates the terminology used by different authors in relation to the four basic adaptation techniques.The overview in Table 1 indicates a lack of standardised terms and inconsistencies.Some of the terms are apparently synonymous (e.g., leaving out, omit, deleting), but other terms and classifications appear to be problematic.For example, McGrath (2016) defines exploitation as 'creative use of what is already there (e.g., text, visual, activity) to serve a purpose which is additional to that foreseen by the textbook writer' (p.71; emphasis in the original); this corresponds to branching denoting a technique 'to add options to the existing activity or to suggest alternative pathways through the activities' proposed by Maley as a form of modification (2011, p. 382).According to Harmer (2007), reducing is a kind of modification, which is reasonable because the appearance of the material is changed, while McDonough et al. (2013), equally plausibly, subsume the corresponding techniques of subtracting and abridging under omission emphasising the reduction in the amount of material.Another example of inconsistent and confusing terminology, given by McDonough et al. (2013), is the definition of rewriting as an attempt to make materials more communicative and learner-centred, which they exemplify with the instance of a teacher who rewrites a reading text and delivers it orally to generate an extra listening practice for the learners.However, there is some overlap to restructuring referring 'essentially to a "modality change"' (p.74), and it is not completely convincing to introduce simplifying as another subcategory denoting language modification: Simplification may be more appropriately comprehended as a principle guiding adaptation (McGrath, 2013;Tomlinson & Masuhara, 2018).To execute a fair evaluation, it should be noted that the scholarly publications considered in the survey in Table 1 differ in that some of them are specifically related to textbook research (e.g., McDonough et al., 2013;McGrath, 2013McGrath, , 2016;;Tomlinson & Masuhara, 2004), while other books allude to the topic as they are introductions to ELT (Harmer, 2007) or deal with curriculum development in language teaching (Richards, 2017).
The fact that two core contributions to the field (Mishan & Timmis, 2015;Tomlinson & Masuhara, 2018) abstain from presenting their own frameworks may be indicative of the difficulty of systematising adaptation techniques.To address the unsatisfactory inconsistency in terminology, we propose a researchinformed framework that was developed and tested in a study examining the textbook utilisations of two English language teachers (Rathert & Cabaroğlu, 2021).The framework is shown in Table 2. Remaining with the four main adaptation techniques, the framework attempts not only to consider forms of minor and major adaptation but also to find a balance between establishing unambiguous but potentially vague categories and more specific categories that may be reduced in their validity because adaptations may fall into more than category given 'all the combinations and permutations' (McDonough et al., 2013, p. 76) in textbook adaptation.The following remarks will clarify and highlight some aspects of the framework.
The main technique omission with its sub-techniques is primarily based on McDonough et al. 's (2013) classification.The category addition combines the systematic accounts presented by McGrath (2013McGrath ( , 2016) ) and McDonough et al. (2013).The sub-techniques extemporisation, extending, expanding, and exploiting may be best distinguished by observing that extending and expanding change the 'appearance' of the material in terms of length while extemporising and exploiting add clarification and a new purpose to the material.Differently from expanding, supplementation has no direct impact on the textbook material.McGrath (2013) argues that supplementation does not count as adaptation, claiming that 'supplementation involves introducing something new' (p.72).His own example of supplementation, a 'presentation activity (based on a new topic -preparatory; books closed)' (p.145, emphasis in the original), however, suggests that supplementation counts as adaptation because the supplementary material is connected to a component in the textbook as it prepares learners for the textbook component.To give another example, supplementing an image to pre-teach vocabulary in a reading text in the textbook, does count as adaptation because the learners' cognitive load while doing the reading tasks is lowered so that they face fewer difficulties in comprehending the text or engaging in follow-up tasks based on the reading text.Supplementation can also address the content of a textbook component that has already been dealt with in a lesson.A teacher may supplement, for instance, a text that is thematically unrelated to the content of a unit in the textbook but contains examples of a grammar point introduced in the unit to give the learners extra practice.
A significant criterion to identify a realised adaptation as substitution is that the replaced and replacing components serve approximately the same purpose.Modification draws on the terminology employed by McDonough et al. (2013), but the term is differently defined in our framework, and the corresponding sub-techniques are related differently to each other.We do not follow McDonough et al. 's (2013) definition of rewriting based on the more common understanding of the term according to which this technique aims at the change of the language or content of a material, possibly in combination.Restructuring addresses a change in modality (i.e., a text is used to practice a different language skill than in the textbook material), or in classroom management.In particular, we consider simplification as a principle in line with McGrath (2013; see the next section).

Principles
From a pedagogical standpoint, textbook adaptation should be informed by overarching considerations and guidelines that are beyond immediate purposes arising from specific reasons (McGrath, 2013, p. 66).To label such considerations and guidelines, the term principles (used by McDonough et al., 2013, p. 69;McGrath, 2013, p. 66;Tomlinson & Masuhara, 2018, p. 108) referring to 'research and theory about best practices in language teaching and learning' (Macalister, 2016b, p. 44) has been suggested.
The most original contributions to delineate such principles were given by Islam and Mares (2003), McGrath (2013) and Tomlinson and Masuhara (2018).Table 3 summarises their accounts.While each of the three sources has things in common (e.g., personalise/personalisation/make relevant connections with learners' lives), Tomlinson and Masuhara (2018) more strongly emphasise the need to integrate validated insights gained in second language acquisition (SLA) research into textbook production (cf.Macalister, 2016b).McGrath's notion of humanising is a very broad term entailing connecting materials to learners' lives and serving their intellectual, aesthetic, and emotional needs (McGrath, 2013, p. 69).The need to humanise textbooks is grounded in the presupposition that textbooks with their texts, tasks, and activities suit learner needs and will lead to intended outcomes irrespective of the context they are used in.However, local or individual differences such as learner needs and interests, their previous knowledge, gained abilities or learning styles may guide teachers to engage in some kind of adaptation to enhance the relevance, attractiveness or complexity of textbook material (Maley, 2018).Tomlinson (2015Tomlinson ( , 2018) )  Such activities along with the integration of music, dance, art, or drama provide learners with sensory experiences and address their kinaesthetic or aesthetic preferences, intensify engagement and lead to deeper cognitive processing (Tomlinson, 2018;cf. Maley, 2018).
An obvious example of an activity that engages learners neither affectively nor cognitively is in the language textbooks' frequently employed textually explicit comprehension question activity (Freeman, 2014).For example, a question may read 'What do they have for breakfast?' and the text 'They have eggs and coffee for breakfast' .Because the wording in the question matches the wording in the text, this activity 'simply involves surface recognition' (Tomlinson, 2018, p. 24) and is, therefore, unlikely to facilitate language learning.In the example given, learners do not even have to understand the meaning of the words 'breakfast' , 'eggs' , or 'coffee' to answer the question correctly.An adaptation to make the question cognitively more activating would be a change of the wording, for example, 'What do they eat in the morning?' Asking the learners to compare the breakfast habits described in the text with their own habits would enhance the relevance of the reading activity for the learners.
In order to compare and synthesise the principles listed in Table 3, we suggest an identification of the main foci addressed.Our reorganisation distinguishes between principles mainly associated with the learners and their personal dispositions, the learning process as contributing to SLA, and the textbook itself.
Following our categorisation, adaptation is associated with the learners specifically addressing: • their personal needs and interests by selecting relevant content (personalising); • their individual learning styles, strengths and weaknesses by integrating activities that suit, for example, kinaesthetic or aesthetic preferences or aim at differentiation through simplification or complexification (individualisation); • their geographic location/cultural background or experienced (thus expected) forms of instruction (localisation).
Adaptation may consider SLA research by employing texts and activities that • are cognitively challenging and compelling; • are affectively engaging; • increase learner self-efficacy; • expose learners to authentic language and tasks (i.e., language examples and activities referring to language use outside the classroom); • build communicative competence; • are informed by the principles of discovery learning.
Adaptation may be a response to the quality of the textbook when • its content, language, or methodological approach is outdated (modernisation); • it is characterised by repetitiveness or a lack of variety in activities or linguistic input.
Admittedly, the principles are overlapping.For instance, the provision of cognitively challenging and compelling materials can be potentially realised via personalisation and individualisation.It should also be noted that a specific instance of an adaptation is likely to be driven by one or two principles but not by all principles shown.Putting it differently, teachers are likely to be informed by some of the principles when they engage in an adaptation that is caused by the perceived incongruence of the textbook material with the learning context.In line with this, Tomlinson and Masuhara (2018, p. 108) remark that a principled approach to adaptation is based on the identification of deficiencies in the textbook.For instance, if content in the textbook is outdated (e.g., a reading text dealing with a technological novelty at the time of textbook production that is no longer a novelty when it is used in class), the teacher may decide to substitute the text based on the principle of modernisation.

Reasons and Purposes
The example given at the end of the previous section shows that principles, by nature, point to specific reasons and purposes to adapt textbook materials.Reasons and purposes are intertwined as they are 'like a flip of a coin.The former focuses on what needs improving, the latter targets improving' (Tomlinson & Masuhara, 2018, p. 102).In the example of the outdated textbook content (the reason), a teacher may substitute the text in the textbook with another text in order to avoid material that is likely to have a demotivating effect on learners because they perceive it as irrelevant (the purpose).Menkabu and Harwood (2014) report on an English teacher who delivers instruction in medical English: The teacher omits textbook components because her content knowledge is insufficient (the reason).One may assume that the teacher does not want to expose their learners to erroneous information or embarrass herself in the class by revealing her limited content knowledge (the purpose), but this conclusion entails some speculation.
To lift these and other examples reported in the literature to a more explanatory level, the distinction between external forces including curriculum, assessment and methodology regulations set by authorities (e.g., ministries, school districts), internal forces such as teacher beliefs about teaching and learning or received teacher education and situated forces encompassing expectations of school authorities, parents, colleagues, and learners is a useful starting point to account for teacher decisions on instructional practices including textbook use (Zheng & Davison, 2008, p. 172).More specifically related to how language teachers adapt textbooks, Tomlinson and Masuhara (2018, pp. 102-104), based on a concise review of case studies on textbook use, identified five factors that impact teachers when they utilise textbooks in their instructional practices: • the national, regional, institutional and cultural teaching environment (e.g., curricula, examinations, school culture, views about appropriate content); • the learners (e.g., age, learner biographies, learning styles, interests, incentives for learning); • the teachers (e.g., personalities, belief systems, teaching styles, levels of teacher autonomy, educational background and professional experience); • the immediate course and lesson context (e.g., objectives, syllabi, the time/day of a lesson); • the textbook (e.g., outdatedness or modernity, methodological approach favouring a deductive or inductive approach to language learning, presentation/explanation of language features).
Zheng and Davison (2008) and Tomlinson and Masuhara (2018) emphasise that these factors do not exert an effect in isolation.Indeed, textbook adaptation is realised in a complex interplay of factors, may be realised intuitively or unconsciously (Islam & Mares, 2003), or even in 'a haphazard way' (Loh & Renandya, 2016, p. 107).Studies documenting that textbook adaptation by teachers may undermine validated principles of language teaching (Abdel Latif, 2017;Seferaj, 2014) or may be an outcome of routinised behaviour (Menkabu & Harwood, 2014;Rathert & Cabaroğlu, 2021) underline the need to inform teachers and teacher educators about procedures to identify needs for adaptation and steps to implement adaptation in a more systematic way.

Procedures
We have seen that textbook adaptation aims at removing mismatches between the textbook material and other factors.It is a process in which teachers employ (or at least should employ) specific techniques based on principles as a response to an identified problem.However, textbook adaptation is not necessarily an outcome of a reflective process: teachers may not be aware of their own adaptations (Menkabu & Harwood, 2014) and beliefs about one's own textbook adaptation may not reflect actual adaptation (Tasseron, 2017).Teachers may engage in adaptations that are not based on pedagogic concerns but serve pragmatic purposes: Rathert and Cabaroğlu (2021), for example, show that teachers may simplify cognitively engaging textbook activities in order not to fall behind the institutional schedule.They also provide evidence that a strictly structured sequence of textbook tasks encourages teachers to follow the procedures prescribed and prevents them from reflecting on how to enhance the potential of textbooks as a means to facilitate learning through adaptation.It has been argued that particularly global ELT textbooks with their 'recurring structure, ensuring predictability across the materials as a whole' (Littlejohn, 2012, p. 291) contribute to the standardisation of teaching and the deskilling of teachers.These effects are likely to materialise in overreliance on textbooks along with the avoidance of principled adaptations that reflect the learning context.
To arrive at informed and target-oriented adaptations, Cunningsworth (1995, p. 137) calls for an examination of contents, topics, methods, and unit objectives to evaluate whether they are congruent with the teaching context.A more detailed seven-step procedure was proposed by Tomlinson andMasuhara (2004, as cited in Tomlinson &Masuhara, 2018, p. 104).Starting from the development of the teaching context by evaluating, for instance, learner needs, course objectives or school equipment in order to base adaptations on accurate assumptions, reasons to engage in adaptation are identified and objectives informed by the principles explained above are formulated.The adaptation of the textbook material is then realised, and adaptations may be revised in the light of classroom experiences, for example, when the same content is taught in a parallel class the following day.This cyclical procedure is idealised, and teachers will not have to follow the steps to the letter.Indeed, Tomlinson and Masuhara (2018) find it noteworthy that textbook adaptation is an intuitive, organic, dynamic but principled creative process that is stimulated by the teachers' motivation to provide the best teaching input and approaches for specific learners in a specific context with specific learning objectives.We would discourage the prescribed use of techniques or advice as this could be counteractive or even damaging to teachers' creativity.(p.105) To summarise, adaptation can be a proactive decision as a part of lesson planning as a response to an anticipated challenge, a reactive, ad hoc intervention based on a perceived difficulty while teaching (Islam & Mares, 2003;Li & Harfitt, 2017;McGrath, 2013) or an outcome of experiences of using the material (Amrani, 2011).Even if an unprincipled attempt to adapt material may -by chance -generate learning, the need to tailor adaptation to the learner context in order to generate learning opportunities appears to be crucial irrespective of the procedure followed.

Conclusion
To research textbook adaptation and to inform practitioners (teachers, teacher educators and teacher trainers) about what it means to adapt textbook materials, it is important to possess an array of terminology to describe techniques, underlying principles as well as specific reasons and purposes that contribute to the act of adapting textbook materials.Figure 2 displays a visual summary of the steps and factors involved in textbook adaptation discussed in this paper.

Figure 2 Textbook adaptation: factors and steps in textbook adaptation
Appreciating the need to allow teachers to shape instructional practice creatively, we have focused on principles in textbook adaptation that are calibrated to generate learning opportunities.These principles do not exclusively aim at a textbook utilisation conducive to achieving expected learning outcomes measured in exam scores or desired learner behaviour (Ariyan & Pavlova, 2019;cf. Taggart & Wilson, 2005).They aim to raise the teachers' awareness of the need to critically assess what the textbook offers as 'the engine that drives much current practice' (Thornbury, 2013, p. 217) and to evaluate alternative practices.From this it follows that teachers need support in teacher education and professional development to become critical and informed textbook users with the perspective to develop their own materials (Agba, 2018;Bouckaert, 2019;Matić, 2019;Walterman & Forel, 2015).We hope that our paper contributes to this issue by providing a theoretical underpinning of textbook adaptation in English language teaching.

Biographical note
Stefan Rathert, PhD, is an assistant professor in the field of English language teaching at the Faculty of Education, Kahramanmaraş Sütçü İmam University, Turkey.His research interests include language teaching materials development, teaching methods, translanguaging in language teaching and professional development for teachers.
Neşe Cabaroğlu, PhD, is a full professor in the field of English language teaching at the Faculty of Education, Çukurova University, Adana, Turkey.She received her Master of Arts Degree in 1993 (Çukurova University) and Doctor of Philosophy at the University of Reading, UK in 1999.Her research interests and expertise are in the areas of foreign language teaching and learning, language teaching methodology, pre-service teacher education and teachers' professional development.

Table 1
Adaptation techniques suggested in the literature plus: add expand zero: modify, replace, reorganise, resequence, convert

Table 2
Research-informed framework of adaptation techniques

Table 3
Principles guiding adaptation offered in the literature *Listed by the authors, but not explicated in the text.
developed and collected a variety of adaptation ideas to make materials a better match for the learners.
• learners chant out a drill in different voices, imitating, for instance, a young child, an old man, or an angry person.